Digital marketplaces go hand-in-hand with social networks. This collaboration has forever changed the way customers interact with service providers and brands.

It’s a multisided marketplace platform that creates value by enabling interactions between two or more customer groups.

The latest trends have resulted in a new business model called “professional networking”. Professional networking is a medium that combines the main features of an online marketplace and a social network.

On one hand, such platforms remind social networking apps. They enable professionals to create a profile to showcase their works and communicate and build relations with people having similar interests.

On the other hand, they are similar to online marketplaces, as they offer a specific medium where customers can find the right service providers and make a transaction.

Besides, professional networking is a platform since it provides users with particular tools for negotiating, collaborating, and managing their paperwork.

A marketplace business cannot acquire customers if there are no or only a few Service Providers on it, and would not be able to convince a Service Provider to sign up if there are no customers on the site. That’s the chicken and egg problem of a marketplace where it gets stuck between whom to bring first- Service Providers or the Service Seekers.

Our Business Directory helps to overcome this problem. We introduce a printed business directory into the community & contribute service providers' contact details categorized based on their professions. Later we printed their details & distributed this directory to every household in the locality. We got a lot of subscribers & they find this idea helpful for them by contacting any service provider to fulfill their requirement. 

We will use an evolution strategy then. We will upgrade every service provider & list them in our service marketplace app & then ask our customers to join there to get the services. This way it helps to overcome the famous chicken-or-egg problem. We have enough service providers listed in our app & therefore enough service seekers too.